I could use some help updating this 2003 Retroworks Mining Factsheet.
Circular Economy of Digital Reference Cycles
While the fundamentals of the Retroworks Mining Factsheet remain in place, it has not been updated since 2003. For example, it needs carbon emission reference points (a great grad school paper next semester? I promise to review it).
Let's assume that people without a sense of environmental conscience don't spend time on this blog. Longtime readers know that I'm in recycling because of "religious" or "philosophical" experiences I had in the 1970s. In distilling the ethos of hippies and hillbillies (elderly god-fearing folks I also admire), I might have coined a term "Agent of Conscience".
Time to "recalculate the route" of environmental strategy. We know that we need people who care, and we know that it needs to be science based. We hope to develop cures for planet health the way western medicine cured smallpox and polio. And borrowing from the March of Dimes polio strategy, we aren't above using poster children if the timing is right.
First, we need a personal end point or destination, a true north. At least, that's where I started. Without history and accountability and scientific method, Environmentalists will be left Grasping for Straws. In the big math, the net cost of extraction vs. reuse/repair/recycling, finding novel things to make people to feel guilty about isn't going to get us to our sustainable destination.
"I believe in global warming" "I don't believe in global warming"
These two statements seemed to starkly define a generation. They become emblems of environmentalism, or environmental skepticism. Many use one of these statements to define who they are. The first is more popular, perhaps, because it's emblematic of compassion, and people dig compassion.
I believe extinction, the consumption of diverse species, is the simplest measure of our society's place in history of the planet. Any other measure - carbon, or prayers, temperature, or wealth - is a distraction from what future people will care about that we did today. What drives our impacts today? Protein and Gold.
I dig baby elephants. And I want baby elephants to have papas and mommies. It's a simple faith in nurture, and it doesn't make me an environmental scientist. But because I don't want elephants, or frogs, or tigers, walruses, or seals to be extinct, I work in recycling. And it has nothing at all to do with landfills, or with carbon. To save these species, we must alter our love of metals, especially expensive metals like gold. And if you think teaching humans to consume less energy is challenging, try teaching people to let go of gold.
This is not a statement about the science of global warming. It's a statement about human psychology, and the way media tries to educate society about need for change. When we need society's consumption to change - and I'm convinced more than ever that we do - we need to understand our own psychology, our own cognitive dissonance, our own appetite for opinion change, and to invest in messages which opinion research indicates will make a darn difference one hundred to one thousand years from now.
For now, the loudest discussions, if not debate, are over global warming and climate change (thanks Mr. Gore). There is no denying that there are many, many sophisticated arguments humans engage in to support either position at the top on belief in global warming. There is also no denying that public discussion of the issue focuses primarily on the psychology and assessment of the opponent.
Merely referencing dry scholarly work on the shrinking (or not) of Mars poles, as an indicator of the average temperature on Mars, demands an apology. From Yahoo answers discussion, links to these two papers are presented with a disclaimer... "I'm not a denier but evidence shows that they (Mars plar caps) are melting."
The discussion of global warming here on earth is usually hedged today with similar qualifiers. "It's undeniable that even if the Earth is warming for other reasons (solar or celestial energy), that humans are producing more carbon, and carbon will exacerbate the rate of global warming."
(Sarcasm alert) "It's Ok! It's recycled mercury, from USA lamp recycling. We're using it to get virgin gold, not recycled gold! USA lamp recycling (mercury retort) is all sold to us to get gold from rivers. That's good!"
"It would be bad if we were getting value out of waste. We get value out of rivers."
"And we don't have to work in a repair job."
Never mind THOSE poisoned children. (article on mercury poisoning of fish from African rivers) The NGOs didn't photograph THEM.
(Link above to press release on mercury poisoning in African rivers, contaminating fish cultures and fish ponds established by Peace Corps volunteers like myself in the 1980s).
Mercury is used to mine gold. News alert - it's far, far, far worse than gold extraction from aqua regia "acid baths", which I've never seen or heard of in Africa. But all the policy debate is about how Africans "might" use acid baths for circuit boards, while in actuality, Africa is the final resting point for mercury which American recyclers spend billions of dollars to divert from our RCRA landfills.
Sitting in the exhibit hall of CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, at the World Trade Center (an enlightened name for an exhibit hall) in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In part I, I mapped the toxics in the USA, contrasting the tonnage of serious toxics (remote areas, primarily from raw material extraction) to the number of 100 data points close to urban areas. I used this to support my thesis that environmental enforcement correlates positively with property value.
In Part II, I put the USA map into a generic Venn-like diagram (below), with the bluer areas representing land with high property value, and the green areas representing forests, tundra, moutains - land not valuable except to minimalist living or raw material exploit or agriculture. The remote areas, where:
THIS HAPPENS (Mexico primary lead smelter 1999) THIS HAPPENS (Peru primary ore smelter 2009)
And THIS HAPPENS (Zambia primary ore mining 2007)
And THIS HAPPENS (China primary copper, zinc, lead smelting 2000-1010)
In Part III, I made analogies over 130 years, how mercury mining and Indian wars and extinction of bison in the big green wild USA parallels the mercury mining, conflict metal wars, and extinction of gorillas in the wild jungles. And the tinker Irish laborers in Boston who made paper mills survive by switching to recycled feedstock were looked down on 130 years ago, and suffered in the "great stink" of flushing toilets in Baltimore, much like repairpeople in Accra are looked down upon by recyclers while the goods they fix are labelled toxic, and while rich flood the markets with used devices... Accra repairman lives in an Irish ghetto in a USA eastern city, and Congo mercury miner lives in the wild green lands of Wounded Knee.
In Part 4, I want to explore how the miracle of transportation allows trade between different zip codes in different countries.
I'm going to put this up temporarily with a Tom Waits song (a little drop of poison) and then delete it in a few days. It's below the fold...
Well a rat always knows when he's in with weasels... 1) Mining and smelting investments are driven away from property values; they create most of the poison, species and habitat loss, carbon, etc. It's an ugly business. Most of the "harm" your computer will ever commit to the earth was done before you brought it home from the store and opened the box. 2) Labor value is found in high density in ghettos (lighter blue) and "emerging" neighborhoods. It is a resource, and it is agnostic... it does not recognize whether metal is "Mined ore" or "Recycled Ore", and putting a label of "waste" onto urban ores has had unintended consequences. In the past few years, the term "waste" has been abusively applied to material which is "in surplus" in one geographic location (e.g. working CRT monitors) and sold, added value intact, to a market where the goods are not in surplus. An alien would not understand how recycled metal is regulated differently from virgin metal, the wealth or nationality of the previous scrap metal owner would be undetectable.
But the alien de Tocqueville would be able to see material moving around, and see the economic value of the property that people were living in, and see the regulatory functions were associated with property value.
The Spock de Tocqueville would observe People trying to feed their siblings hungry kids will do a lot of things. "Useless Lists of Jobs Beneath Wealthy People" and "E-Waste Poster Child" blogs were my attempts to treat people doing "e-waste", primitively or immaculately, in a position as an equal.
Below is a chart which I have trouble fitting here, but it's my attempt to show the jobs people have moving value and creating value out of the various land value areas.
If you follow the movement of material and value through the digestive system of adolescent nations, you learn that the free market has a lot of environmental credit.
The historical marker, near the Nevada-Arizona border, marks a gold mine, on federal land.
That pile of mining waste is farther away than you think. Its b i g .
If I could just dump all the electronics onto federal land, submit them to acids and fire, I'd leave less pollution, and since the land was owned by the government, I'd have no cleanup cost. Federal land mining by private metal companies bankrupted Superfund.
I admit that if we reform the General Mining Act of 1872 - which needs another "Historical Marker" - that the mining may move to rainforests in the southern hemisphere. But reform of GMA 1872 would also boost recycling stocks, and would cause Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and other "mining magnets" to change their own policies on metal mining.
The worst recycling is better than the best metal mining. Build your house next to here and drill a well for drinking water and see how it goes....
Sure we can do them both here at home. But if mining is unleashed, why leash recycling? THAT'S OUR DOG IN THIS FIGHT. Hell, instead of outsourcing mining, what if we outsource our better activity, recycling? (My suggestion)
This is a company using reuse in Ghana to subsidize Ghana's e-waste recycling. Bad as in "good".
If I ran "Basel Action Network" or "Greenpeace" or "Natural Resources Defense Council", I'd notice that this MINING activity is visible from the highway... Hell, it's visible from OUTER SPACE. But a small recycling hut - even one with an Asian child pooched out on the scrap pile - would not be visible in this photo.
And which one, from this distance, would you be more worried about drinking from?
The Journalist's heroin is the byline. When the journalists themselves become emotionally or physically involved in a story, it's fodder for awards and support of fellow interviewers and cameramen.
Gold Scrap Buyer Pushes Journalist - My joke Polk
I just saw the interview of the journalist who worked on this story (NY Channel 4 NBC Local News) on a crackdown on gold scrap buyers in the NY area. They were accused by regulators of not displaying their prices and scales, and probably some of them were being "shady" with consumers who don't know scrap prices. Hey, not as bad as buying from crackheads who break into homes. But these are typically used by people in some desperate situation, selling jewels from a departed relative, or trying to raise money for surgery, and the consumer has to rely on the "professional". We need regulation and investigation.
As a former regulator, I also understand that while the real problem is burglary and theft, that you pressure the regulated if you crack down on something lower key - advertising and buying. It's similar to the "no graffiti" policy, if you enforce that little things are done right fewer big things go wrong.
Anyway, from one of these rather routine local enforcements on gold and silver scrap buyers in New York, a "NBC Local News Team" decided to go Scott Pelley 60 Minutes on their asses and take a camera to the scrap guy's store, put his storefront on camera as a centerpiece to the "fraud" headline.
And the younger scrap guy pushed the cameraman's camera into his face. Sound familiar?
infamous "tidy little shop" purporting to be "other side" balance
It could happen anywhere...
The interview I just saw had this video footage in the background, but the interview was really of the reporter. (uh-oh). He describes how it's normal, businessmen should expect to be interviewed, you don't like it but it's how the game is played. He described how his cameraman is his homie and how he spends more time with the cameraman than he does with his family, and how an eye socket could have been injured by the push of a camera, and how police came to the scene and a report of physical assault on the cameraman is now added to the enforcement on price display and scale visibility.
I'm not saying that this is the same as CBS in Guiyu. But what I saw in the CBS 60 Minutes story on computer monitor recycling in Hong Kong was familiar in this NY Channel 4 news story. And the reaction of the scrap dealers to having news cameras in their lots is familiar.
Two years ago I followed up my critique above with a more detailed shot-by-shot dissection of the CBS 60 Minutes Wasteland episode. I never get a call back from CBS news crew, who took an hour of my time doing background on the story. The lesson I took is that when the reporter has a choice between a story which is much more complicated and less exciting but more accurate than the one he set out on, or a story where he/she is a "hero" defending an assault on "their own" cameraman with footage that proves the businesspeople have "something to hide", that the latter story is easier and will appear "above the fold", so to speak.
The real "tidy little shops" fixing used electronics
What I do not understand is the decision to give a George Polk Award to these people. Well... I do understand it. The awards people didn't know anything about the SKD (semiknockdown) factories in Asia which were buying back CRT monitors for refurbishing to new-in-box condition for sale to Egypt, India, and Africa. The Polk is a JOURNALIST award - that is, a reward to a single individual who is chosen to symbolize bravery, integrity and courage in journalism. The Peabody Award is different, it recognizes a journalism organization (so I understand).
In either case, if it is discovered that a journalist did something in Guiyu China which was actually about as brave as NBC Channel 4 local news on gold and silver scrap buying, and that the exotic locale of China and Americans willingness to believe that the bottom of China's normal curve is "the truth" and that the factories which actually purchased and refurbished most of the monitors in Hong Kong harbor were defamed in the process...
Here is the formula:
Ingredient 1: Something people don't understand completely (plastic, circuit boads, display devices) but which they feel familiar with, feel first hand experience with.
Ingredient 2: Cognitive Risk word, "fraud" or "toxic" or "children" or "sex"
Ingredient 3: Reporter with microphone shot in "exotic" locale, especially surrounded by brown skinned people in physical poverty.
Presto: All the ingredients for a journalistic excellence award. And as journalism rewards this, it breeds copycats. The "we buy gold scrap in NY" expose above. The "Fair Trade Cotton Victoria's Secret" where photos of the "mud hut" of the worker demostrate the "bravery" of the reporter. The trembly-voiced Mike Daisy surrounded by ficticious machine guns at (the wrong) contract assembly plant (he was in Shenzhen, the iPhone worker poisoning happened at a different Chinese factory, literally hundreds of miles away, he was stealing a story from another reporter).
Idea... Hey, there are lots of reporters in China, working for cheap wages. Maybe we can mass-produce these stories? I'm thinking of the South Park Family Guy Manatee method, combine ju-ju technology words (polymer, flame retardant, megahertz, microwave) with a cognitive risk word (cancer, uterus, babies, negro), put a reporter in an untrained PR environment (shopping mall, scrap yard, battlefield) and voila. If people with consciences care about it, it's difficult to understand, it has "profit" and "fraud" and "sex" and "race" ingredients, and a human nature ("get offa my lawn") reaction from the engaged businesspeople, we could go to town, and start minting these Peabody and Polk and Pulitzer puppies.
ARSTechnica is a good blog for Geeks. It was therefore a shock to see them feature a rehashed "E-Waste Export" diatribe, written by James Holloway of the Open University.
In his article, Toxic trade: why junk electronics should be big business, Holloway correctly identifies the importance of the rare earth metals, including gold, which are lost when used electronics are disposed of in the landfill. Back in the 1990s, when I was Recycling Director for the Massachusetts DEP, I made much the same case. The pollution, toxics, energy, and rain forest loss from mining reddish metals, from places like the OK Tedi Copper Mine on the isle of Papua New Guinea, represent a much deeper environmental priority than recycling green wine bottles and old packaging.
He quotes our friends at StEP in Europe (where I'm now typing) about the enormous waste represented by lost circuit boards, with the gold (and tantalum, and silver, and copper... I would add) if a computer is tossed into a burning pile of waste.
At current rates of production, $16 billion (or 320 tons) in gold and $5 billion (7500 tons) in silver are put into media tablets, smartphones, computers, and other devices annually. With growth in demand for smartphones and media tablets showing little sign of diminishing in the next few years, the flow of gold and silver from deposit to waste facilities is only likely to accelerate.
So far, a good chestnut on the importance of recycling and preserving rare earth metals. But Mr. Halloway then twists the very study he highlights - a study I linked to here when WR3A / Fair Trade Recycling representatives were with StEP at the Pan-African Conference on E-Waste in Nairobi in March.
The jobs represented by labor in Africa and China can be good jobs. And hand-disassembly is a good process, according to the actual articles Mr. Halloway pretends to have read. Rare earth metals (e.g. hard drive magnets) which are lost in European and USA shredders can find new lives in new hard drives when the drive is dismantled. And the UNEP study showed that the reuse and repair jobs from used electronics imports into countries like Ghana represent 100-fold more jobs and employment than the "scrap boys" who dismantle used computers at Agbogloshie or Lagos dumps.
The negatives about waste shown by anti-export groups at those dumps, in study after study, is found to primarily originate from users in Africa... just as the "e-waste" in China mostly comes from Chinese consumers. 85% of the imported electronics, UNEP found, were reused and repaired in Ghana and Nigeria. This put the 2009 "study" (rather an opinion piece) by Interpol in a new light. The Interpol report, which Halloway cites, assumed that 80-90% of the used electronics purchased by Africans were burned in primitive conditions (accepting the Basel Action Network propaganda), and that primitive Africans stupidly burn CRT monitors rather than test them for reuse for, say, internet revolutions in African countries like Libya, Tunisia and Egypt.
Halloway does the same thing as the Interpol author - using passive voice and a completely eroneous and discredited statistic - to build his case around.
" ..it has been widely reported that 90 percent of the USA's e-waste ends up in either China or Nigeria—a figure that appears to originate from an estimate made by Jim Puckett, Director of the Basel Action Network. "
The Interpol report found that Africans were the ones stationed in Europe, buying the used electronics. And allow me to applaud with a hearty "DUH!" Geeks of Color like Wahab in Ghana, Hamdy in Egypt, Souleymane in Senegal, and Miguel in Angola can't afford to pay thousands of dollars in shipping and customs duties to import computers for burning. They either "fly and buy" (inspecting and hand-picking goods prior to export) or rely on Africans studying abroad to test the goods before they are shipped. The Interpol report stunningly labelled these Africans as "organized crime". The report stalled at Interpol and was not translated, it's now considered a TinTin era "white man's burden" paper, completely discredited by UNEP and other people who sat down and talked to the "geeks of color"... people Halloway didn't have time to meet before writing his rehash of covertly racist propaganda on ARsTechnica.
Video: Chris Martenson's presentation to Gold and Silver Mining conference in Madrid. This is fascinating... the metals companies know that recycling and sustainability are not the enemy. The challenge is reality. I respect metal mining companies, even if everthing I do is done to stop them...
This is not going to be an entertaining or pithy scrap blog. I need to write about this video for some personal reasons... it is revisiting, in much more sophisticated way ..
My career as an environmentalist and my choice of recycling was cast in high school, in the late 1970s.
I won the NFL (national forensics league) "double ruby" for public speaking with the points earned from a 1980 speech to a Northwest Arkansas Garden Club conference... with a speech about exponential growth and consumption, comparing resource and energy consumption to a closed ecosystem petri dish experiment. No one but me recalls it. But while it was amateurish redneck attempt by a teenager, it was basically the same speech as Martensen gives above.
My call to action worked... perhaps not on the Garden Club, but on myself. I went to college and ran recycling programs, I studied international relations based on the mining and oil extraction which was headed for rain forests and coral mines, I saw recycling as the most efficient way to save both land resources and energy and to reduce the mining and logging roads that brought humans into rain forests in proximity to bushmeat and species extinction points. I underestimated how much rain forest was falling from meat consumption, but I did understand that human population growth, and consumption per capita, was heading the direction that Chris Martensen describes in his book, and in this Youtube video presented at the Gold and Silver mining conference in Madrid.
Martensen seems to still hold my teenage skepticism and alarm.
On the one hand, I still agree. I'm witnessing a disaster. On the other hand, some of this consumption is accounted for by bringing resources to people who never had them. 80 percent of households today have electricity, worldwide. Cell phones are in use across Africa. The rate of consumption per capita has been expanding, and that consumption per capita accounts for much of the consumptive growth. If the per capita consumption rate of the early adapter consumer drops, it means the size of drops of water in Martensen's eyedropper become smaller with each drop.
The rate of consumption, in other words, is not just people being born, but consumption being offered to more people who never aspired to it. While the population of the USA tripled (from 93 Million) since 1910, the access to things like electricity, refrigeration, and running water also expanded. So 2/3 of the next century's consumption came from increased population, but another 25% came from offering that consumption to the 1/3 of the population which was already here. So the rate of increase in consumption is not going to continue at the same pace... the rest of the world is catching up 4 times as fast as the USA did, and much of the "new" consumption is going to "old" population numbers. That means the rate will slow.
This is only going to soften the blow somewhat, kind of like reaching a level rate of speed before a car crash (Martensen.com refers to it as a "Crash Course"). But it buys time, and technology solutions are time sensitive. As the water reaches us in the top row of bleachers in Martensen's flooding stadium, it rises less and less quickly.
Bad news for the species on the ball field, or the people living in the dugout.
For me, the indicator of our generation's success at environmental sustainability is not a degree of Fahrenheit or Celsius on a calendar. It is the rate of species extinction. In that way, I feel total failure, even if I no longer believe as certainly in a doomsday consequence.
My hopeful solutions, though, are sad ones. They are not about saving the Great Barrier Reef, or restoring the OK Tedi River in Borneo. Now I imagine that DNA may get sequestered, and can we sample and save and sequester species rapidly enough to create a lifeboat, a modern Noah's Ark. The rate at which we are learning about DNA is also exponential, and if we are learning about species loss at a rate faster than species decline, there may be hope in 30,000 years that we'll figure out how to repopulate the desert planet we are creating.
At 32 minutes Martensen describes the diminishing resources for ores, how copper becomes more expensive to extract from the ground each year. But the percentage of households with electricity - worldwide - is 80% today, something unimaginable to me in the 1979 speechwriting time period. As copper gets more expensive, people move to slums which are closer to the source of energy, economizing the copper use.
Must grow, can't grow... I basically agree with much of Martensen's presentation. But I think that what he misses is the rate of credit card consumption (I'm still listening, he may come round to it). The percentage of American's future income which we borrow against has been growing, which actually depletes that future income through compound interest, and believe we have reached an economic tipping point where incomes will not continue to grow. Well in fact incomes stopped growing awhile ago, but the amount of the future income we can borrow is going to stop.
More has been written than I can edit. In fact this isn't worth reading or posting if I don't get around to part 2 or 3... but the lecture by Martenson is worth posting. I have more to say in regards to how economies do grow, in an adolescence which hit the Asian Tigers and BRIC nations. Their rate of consumption, and how it occurs, is now the key task. And we white people look like the Oncler, offering them a truffula seed.
Perhaps I'll get around to editing the second half of this post, in a Part II and III. But there is so, so much recycling work to do around me. The scrap waits.
